uBid

» see ubid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ubid never reached turkey at meaningful scale. by 1998 i was on a 33.6k modem at home and the auction category in my window was eBay, which had english-only listings and shipping costs that made the whole exercise pointless for anyone outside north america. ubid had the same geographic shape and even less reason to ship abroad. it launched in april 1997 as a subsidiary of creative computers, the catalog retailer behind pc mall, and ran consumer auctions on overstock electronics and refurbished business gear.

the december 4 1998 ipo became the cultural moment. shares priced at $15 and closed the first day at $67, giving ubid a market cap of about $1.8 billion against a parent company that was worth a fraction of that. honestly the trade press treated it as the comic peak of the dot-com bubble, a child unit was suddenly more valuable than its parent on paper. roughly. the entire ipo was a 13 percent slice. the secondary market had nothing to do with the actual fundamentals.

not directly. by 2000 ebay had already won the network effect side of the auction question. ubid pivoted twice: once toward business-to-consumer overstock, once back toward person-to-person via the acquired bidville.com. cmgi bought the company for $407 million in 2000. tom petters bought it from cmgi in 2003. that handoff would matter later for reasons that had nothing to do with auctions.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the early product looked like ebay at first glance but worked differently underneath. ubid actually held the inventory or had supplier relationships with the brands directly. you bid on a refurbished compaq desktop and the desktop shipped from a warehouse, not from another bidder's apartment. the format read more like a tv shopping channel than a marketplace, which is also why it could not generate the network effects ebay was building.

~ the unraveling ~

the dot-com crash hit ubid like every dot-com retailer with logistics costs and thin margins. layoffs through 2002 took out 138 staff. the petters acquisition put the company in the orbit of tom petters, who was later convicted in 2009 for running a $3.65 billion ponzi scheme through petters group worldwide. the company rebranded to enable holdings and filed involuntary chapter 11 in october 2009. it limped out the other side as a much smaller closeout retailer.

~ the long tail ~

ubid kept running auctions in a quieter way through the early 2010s. it acquired restaurant.com in 2019 and renamed itself rde inc., pivoting toward coupon distribution and away from the auction format entirely. the ubid.com domain went dark in 2022 without an announcement, by which point the brand had no meaningful active user base left. honestly the actual death of ubid as an auction property happened around 2010 with the bankruptcy. the website outliving the product by twelve more years is the kind of zombie tail that happens when a domain is too cheap to retire.

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